The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  Indeed.

  Speaking of introductions—

  Once, four or five years before Don’s death, I spotted a hand-lettered sign on the wall over his desk. NO MORE INTRODUCTIONS, it proclaimed. That struck me as bizarre. Here was this wonderfully personable fellow, always a genial and eager host; what made him resolve at this late date to quit introducing his guests to one another?

  What he meant, I soon learned, was that he’d resolved to stop responding favorably to requests that he write an introduction to someone’s new collection, or a review of someone’s book, or indeed any of the occasional pieces that one is constantly being invited to turn out.

  Pieces, in fact, which make up a substantial portion of this present volume. Don enjoyed this sort of writing, and as you’ll soon see he was superb at it, but what made him forswear the pursuit was the amount of time and energy it took. He had books to write, and that’s where he wanted to focus his efforts.

  Well, I get the point. I receive a fair number of similar requests myself—one such has me writing the words you’re now reading—and it sometimes strikes me that I could put my time to more productive use. But, see, I wouldn’t; I’d spend those hours playing computer solitaire, or posting inanities on Facebook, or hopscotching my way through Wikipedia.

  So what the hell.

  As for Don’s labor in this varietal vineyard, I’m grateful for it; to it we owe this book’s existence. I’ve read most of these pieces, but read them again as preparation for this foreword. (And that’s another way introductions drain one’s batteries. You don’t just have to write 1000 words. First, you have to read fifty or a hundred times as many words of the material you’ve agreed to introduce. In this instance it was a pleasure. That, alas, is not always the case.)

  It has been my delight to count as friends a couple of people who’ve never written a bad sentence, a clumsy paragraph, or a dull page. Evan Hunter was one. Donald E. Westlake was another.

  Levi Stahl has done a superb job of sifting through Don’s miscellaneous effort, separating the best of the wheat from the rest of the wheat—Don didn’t do chaff—and organizing and notating the result. If I’m to take issue with anything, it’s with a word he uses.

  Jokes.

  In his introduction, Levi describes these selections as being replete with jokes, and says Don found it almost impossible to write a page without putting in a joke. Now I read the entire book, and I can’t recall a single joke.

  A joke is something a comic tells. A joke generally starts with a guy walking into a bar. Or two guys, or even three.

  This is a joke:

  A Frenchman, a German, and a Jew walk into a bar.

  The Frenchman says, “I am tired and thirsty. I must have wine!”

  The German says, “I am tired and thirsty. I must have beer!”

  The Jew says, “I am tired and thirsty. I must have diabetes.”

  There. That’s a joke, and as far as I can tell, it’s the only one you’ll find in this book.

  What you will find, however, and I suspect you’ll find it on every page, is wit. Don was a wonderfully witty man, a fellow of infinite jest, and he took pains to make what he wrote amusing. Wit enlivened his conversation, even as it brightened his writing, fiction and nonfiction alike. In his fiction, his goal was to tell a story; in his other writing, he strove to relate an incident or convey information or make a point. In either case, it was second nature for him to do so with wit and humor.

  The Getaway Car. It’s an inspired title, and Abby’s epigraph is dead accurate. While aspects of their author found their way into every one of his characters, when Don settled himself behind the wheel (and settled may not be le mot juste here) he became Stan Murch, ace wheelman of the Dortmunder gang. Like another of his characters, Don’s ideal car was one that would get you from Point A to Point B in zero seconds.

  When I met him, Don’s New York State driver’s license had been suspended; this happens when you’ve drawn enough speeding tickets, and he was always good at that. He wouldn’t have wanted a car anyway on West 46th Street, but that changed when he moved out to Canarsie. And the day came when the three-year suspension was up, and his license was restored.

  Whereupon he bought a car, and applied for insurance. And was astonished when the insurance company gave him a safe driver discount, because he hadn’t had an accident or a speeding ticket in the past three years.

  There’s a word for that sort of thing. Westlakean.

  An interviewer once asked John O’Hara if he missed the old days of the Algonquin Round Table.

  “No,” he said. “When Benchley died, the party was over.”

  I know what he meant.

  Charles Willeford

  * * *

  Some years after Charles Willeford’s death, I was asked to write an introduction for a paperback edition of his novel, The Shark-Infested Custard. I’d reprint it here, but just about everything I said wound up in my Mystery Scene column, so for once I’ll spare you the repetition.

  I had more to say and more room to say it in the column—though not quite enough room, as it turned out. Kate Stine had to do some judicious cutting for space reasons; being under no such constraints here, I’m able to publish it as written:

  In the summer of 1985, Lynne and I moved from New York to Fort Myers Beach, Florida.

  It’s hard to remember why. We were both New Yorkers in a rather profound way, and we weren’t likely to be happy anywhere else. We bought a big old house right on the Gulf, and the first morning I walked a few steps from my back door to the beach, turned right, and walked for a mile or so and back. The next morning I turned left instead of right, walked a mile, came back. By the third morning I was ready to go home.

  After we’d been there a few months I got a phone call from Dennis McMillan, the small-press publisher. Dennis had been publishing the uncollected work of Fredric Brown, and had commissioned me to write an introduction for his edition of The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches, but that’s not what he was calling about. He was in a car, he said, with Charles and Betsy Willeford, and he wasn’t far from Fort Myers, and he thought they might stop by.

  That sounded good to us. Our neighbors were pleasant enough, but we were starved for company down there, and I welcomed the opportunity to spend a little time with someone who was not only a writer but whose work I very much admired. I wasn’t familiar with much of Willeford’s early work, but I’d read his first Hoke Mosely novel, Miami Blues, shortly after its publication in 1984, and grabbed up the sequel, New Hope for the Dead as soon as it came my way.

  Dennis showed up an hour or so after he called, with Charles and Betsy in tow, and the five of us sat around talking for a while and then went out for a meal. I don’t remember where we went or what we ate, but I do recall two things about our conversation.

  The first was that Charles talked at some length about a book he’d written and self-published eight years previously. It was called A Guide for the Undehemorrhoided, and it clearly concerned a subject about which Charles felt strongly; indeed, he’d written and published it as a service to his fellow man, recounting his own experience in an effort to disabuse the reader of the notion that surgery of this sort could possibly be a Good Idea.

  “I’ll send you a copy,” he said.

  He never did. It’s not impossible that I showed a lack of enthusiasm at the prospect, and that this led him to drop the notion. It’s also possible that it slipped his mind. So I never did have a look at the book—until a few minutes ago, when I Googled my way to Dennis’s website, where I found the first few thousand words of the book. Here’s how it begins:

  “In hospital language a patient does not urinate, micturate, pee, piss, or take a leak. He voids. Or, as in my case, he is unable to void.

  “Hospital jargon is mid-Victorian. My hemorrhoids were not chopped out, hacked away, or operated upon. Instead, my asshole was dilated and debrided. There is no sex talk in a hospital either. Sex organs, male and female, when they ar
e mentioned at all, are discussed formally, as elimination tools; nor is there, apparently, any distinction made between toilets for men and women. Whoever gets inside first has possession, and then there are no locks on the doors. If the doors were labeled, one suspects they would be called ‘Necessary Rooms,’ the euphemism for the toilets of our Gilded Age.

  “Several years ago, before I ever thought of entering a hospital, a friend told me that a nurse’s aide would give a man a slow handjob for five bucks. Unsurprised at the time, I filed the information away, thinking I might be able to use it in a novel some day. I have been sorry since that I failed to press my friend for details. On the disinterested outside, I had no reason to disbelieve him. But on the inside, watching these harried, grimly smiling nurse’s aides—probably the lowest I.Q. occupational group of employees in the nation—rushing about inefficiently, but earning every cent of their $2.40 an hour, I wondered vaguely how my friend had gone about getting his slow handjob. He would have had to draw them a picture. However, discounting the denseness of the nurse’s aides’ understanding, the lack of privacy, the hospital stench and the permeating reek of indignant death—these factors in combination—drove all thoughts of and about sex from my mind during the two weeks of my stay.”

  I certainly wish I’d accepted Charles’s offer with more enthusiasm, and in retrospect it’s hard to imagine why I didn’t. What did I think I’d get from Willeford? Something dry and clinical? Something impersonal?

  Fat chance.

  At some point during our lunch, Charles fixed an eye on me and began talking about people somewhere—Southeast Asia? Maybe—who ate cat. There was, he said, an informal society of men who had eaten cat, and they looked for and acknowledged one another. One man might look at another and say something along the lines of, “You eat cat, don’t you?” And the other might smile and nod in acknowledgment, or raise an eyebrow.

  I don’t remember what I said to this. I didn’t have a clue where he was going with this, and in my puzzlement I may have smiled, or raised an eyebrow. I don’t think I nodded.

  “Now you,” Charles said, “you look to me like a man who has eaten cat.”

  Now at the time I was a vegetarian, so I hadn’t eaten so much as a tuna fish sandwich for seven or eight years, never mind a pussycat. But all I did was say that I hadn’t in fact ever eaten cat.

  Charles seemed to find the admission disappointing. “I’m surprised,” he said. “I thought you might well be a man who has eaten cat.”

  Thinking back, it strikes me that I might at this point have asked Charles if in fact he had ever eaten cat. Maybe he was waiting to be asked. But I didn’t ask, nor did he volunteer any further information on the subject. Indeed, I think someone was kind enough to change the subject, and we went on to talk about something else—which, unlike the putative ingestion of cat, has left my memory altogether.

  I wonder what he meant. Was there a sexual undertone to all of this, was “eating cat” a faintly veiled euphemism for cunnilingus? That occurred to me at the time, naturally enough, but I didn’t think so then, nor do I think so now. I just did a Google search and learned more about the subject of human consumption of cat meat than I ever wanted to know, and my guess, after all these years, is that Charles found the topic interesting enough to toss it into the conversation, just to see what came back.

  And did Charles ever eat cat? I suppose I should have asked him when I had the chance. But I didn’t, and so I don’t know, and don’t need to know.

  But I’ll say this much. I wouldn’t put it past him.

  I saw Charles two or three times after that. Within a year of our initial meeting, I was invited to participate in the Miami Book Fair, where I appeared on a panel. I believe Charles had organized the panel, and suspect he was the source of my own invitation. He was in the audience, and we chatted before and after, but I don’t remember what we talked about. Not cat, I’m fairly certain, as I would have remembered.

  I encountered him again in Key West, where we both took part in a literary symposium in January, 1988. The topic was Whodunit? The Art & Tradition of Mystery Literature, and there were enough interesting writers participating to offset the academic tone set by the sponsors. I ran into Charles and Betsy several times in the course of the weekend, and again enjoyed their company. Sometimes I’d catch him eyeing me speculatively, as if wondering whether I’d ever eaten cat.

  I do recall two conversations with Charles, though I can’t say if they took place in Miami or Key West. Once he was recounting his experiences in the horse cavalry, when they’d been required to kill a dozen or so of their horses. Whoever was ordered to do the deed walked the length of a file of horses, shooting each of the beasts in the head in turn. What greatly impressed Charles was that the shooting of one horse made no apparent impression on the others. Each stood there stolidly until it was its turn, at which time it fell down dead.

  On another occasion he spoke of the high proportion of clinical psychopaths one encountered in the military. There were, he announced, no end of men who liked being in the service because it gave them the opportunity to kill other men. They didn’t seem to care whom they killed, or why, just so they got to do it.

  I subsequently read his first-published memoir, Something About a Soldier, which came out in 1986, and it seems to me that he made some mention there of the psychopaths and the dead horses.

  The Key West event was just about the last thing I did in Florida before taking leave of the state. Within a month Lynne and I had closed our house and took off for two years without a fixed address, driving back and forth across the country, stopping here and there for as little as a day or as much as a month, visiting every town and hamlet we could find named Buffalo (don’t ask), getting to no end of national parks and roadside attractions, along with innumerable towns and hamlets not named Buffalo, all in an attempt to see as much of the country as we could while figuring out where we would like to live next. The answer to that last question was probably obvious all along, but it took us a while to nail it down, and finally on St. Patrick’s Day of 1990 we returned to New York, and we’ve been here ever since.

  Meanwhile, Charles Willeford had died—in Miami, on March 27, 1988. That was long before Google, long before email, long before I even thought about getting a computer, and no one could have called me with the news because it was long before cell phones, too, and I was in a motel somewhere—Buffalo Gap, Texas, maybe, or Buffalo Center, Iowa. So it was months before I learned he was gone, but I remember the feeling of loss and sadness. I’d known Charles was not in the best of health; he didn’t talk about it, but it was evident. So in that sense the news was not unexpected. But it was shocking all the same; when one meets with so clear and distinct a voice, one expects it to be around forever.

  Not long after Charles’s death I began to hear the rumors. Charles had left a fifth Hoke Moseley novel, an impossibly dark novel, in which either Hoke killed his two daughters, or died himself, or both. And the book would eventually be published, or was deemed too dark to be published, or . . . well, various rumors advanced various possibilities.

  This sort of rumor is not uncommon, both before and after the death of a popular writer, especially one with a beloved series character. Several years before John D. MacDonald died, fans were speculating about the likelihood of a final Travis McGee novel; each of the books had a color in the title (The Deep Blue Goodbye, The Green Ripper, The Scarlet Ruse), and the word was that this last book would have Black in the title, and McGee would die at the end of it. The rumors increased when John D. passed. Yes, he had indeed written such a book! Yes, it had Black in the title! Yes, McGee would die on the last page! Yes, it would be published!

  Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

  Once in an indigo moon, the rumor proves true. Agatha Christie wrote not one but two novels for posthumous publication, signing off on both Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot. (Both were written decades earlier.)

  The Willeford rumor persisted, and it
turned out to be partially true. The book was called Grimhaven, and one can find the following notation about it in the Willeford archive at the Broward County Library: NOTE: as per Betsy Willeford: “Ms. of the ‘black Hoke Moseley’, never published, sold to a small but ruthless group of collectors in the form of Xerox copies. May not be copied in the library by patrons who’ll wholesale it on the Internet.”

  Five or six years after its author’s death, someone sent me a photocopy of the manuscript of Grimhaven. I read it right away, and saw at once that it was not intended as a fifth Hoke Moseley book but as that series’ second volume. It had been written as a sequel to Miami Blues, a sequel Willeford did not at all want to write.

  Miami Blues, which introduced Hoke Moseley, was the first book of Willeford’s to get a strong promotional effort, and it profited immensely by it. The book got a very strong and favorable response from the critics, drew a lot of attention to its author, and sold well. The publisher, not too surprisingly, wanted Willeford to write a sequel, and indeed to make Hoke a series character.

  Should it surprise us to learn that Charles Willeford, whose characters constantly exhibit quirky, contrary, self-defeating behavior, should balk at the notion? He really didn’t want to write another Hoke Moseley book, and his publisher really wanted him to write that and nothing else.

  So Charles sat down and knocked out a book designed to nip the series in the bud. In all likelihood his publishers would pass on the book, but if they went ahead and brought it out, well, the series would at the very least end with the second volume. Because in its pages Hoke, this wonderfully interesting and sympathetic hero, murders his daughters, gets arrested for the crime, and looks forward to being confined to a prison cell for the rest of his life, thus fulfilling the book’s epigraph quote, from Blaise Pascal: “All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room by himself.” Hoke is destined to do just that, in a small room indeed, and the likelihood of our reading further about him would seem remote at best.